(Reuters) – Scientists in Chile’s Patagonia region have discovered fossils of the southernmost dinosaurs recorded outside Antarctica, including the fossilized remains of giants that would have dominated the region’s food chain before their mass extinction.
Fossils of Megaraptor, a carnivorous dinosaur that lived in parts of South America during the Cretaceous period about 70 million years ago, have been found to measure sizes up to 10 meters, according to the South American Journal of Geosciences.
“We lost a piece,” Marcelo Lippi, director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute, told Reuters. “We knew where large mammals are, there will also be large carnivores, but we haven’t found them yet.”
The remains, which were recovered from the Rio de las Chinas Valley in far south Chile in the Magallanes Basin between 2016 and 2020, also include some unusual remains of an unusual Velociraptor-like dinosaur that likely lived covered with feathers.
The samples, according to University of Chile researcher Jared Amodio, have some characteristics not found in their Argentine or Brazilian counterparts.
[1/5] A man works in the area where scientists discovered megaraptor fossils at Tell Guido in Chilean Patagonia, near Torres del Paine Park, Magallanes and Antarctica, Chile in this undated photo provided by the Chileno Antarctic Institute on January 16. 2023. Instituto Chileno Antarctico/Handout via Reuters
“It could be a new species, which is very likely, or it belonged to another closely related family of dinosaurs,” he said, adding that more conclusive evidence was needed.
The studies also shed more light on the conditions of the meteorite impact on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
Leppe of INACH noted a sharp drop in temperatures over present-day Patagonia and waves of intense cold that lasted for several thousand years, in contrast to the extremely hot climate that prevailed for most of the Cretaceous period.
“The tremendous diversity we’re seeing, the biodiversity, was also responding to very strong environmental triggers,” Libby said.
“This world was already in crisis before (the meteorite), and this is evident in the rocks of the Rio de las Valley, China,” he said.
(Reporting by Marion Giraldo) Writing by Sarah Moreland, Editing by Alistair Bell
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